Yes, The Coronavirus Should Scare You S**tless

Not only now, but in the decades to come.

Many people like to be contrarians, to take the viewpoint less popular in the view of the experts and PhD’s. I admit I’m one of those who does so, who rails against conservative wisdom, who stands on a rock trying to tell the rest of the lemmings to not follow the one jumping off that cliff.

But sometimes, conventional wisdom is right. Today’s collective freak-out over the coronavirus is one such example. The experts are right, and you and your family would do well to listen to them.

I first really understood the danger of pandemics after reading John Barry’s “The Great Influenza” which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. This is without exception the scariest book I’ve ever read. In the book, Barry describes just how easily the H1N1 virus was spread from person to person, from Kansas to the battlefields of WWI, from Inuit villages that suffered a 100% mortality rate to Indian trains that arrived with scores of corpses that had begun the journey in apparent full health. Barry’s descriptions recollections of collections of corpses in Philadelphia little different from that experienced during the Black Death of pre-Renaissance Europe. During the 1918–19 plague, America suffered nearly 700,000 deaths when our national population was less than one-third what it is today.

It was that book that opened my eyes to just how dangerous a pandemic can be. Most of us have grown up not having to worry about smallpox or…